I’ll admit that if I were to get into the games industry, I’d want to lead a team making larger-scale projects. The difficulty is balancing this with creating something of narrative or artistic interest, and one of the Creative Directors that has succeeded in doing this is Neil Druckmann, the C.D. at Naughty Dog for The Last of Us.
Druckmann is actually an alumni of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center. It was there that he met one of the co-founder’s of Naughty Dog, Jason Rubin, and I was through him that he got his first job in video games, interning at Naughty Dog. He was promoted to a full-time gameplay programmer a few months later.
After a few years programming at Naughty Dog, Druckmann managed to convince one of Naughty Dog’s presidents to look at his design work, and obtained the chance to work in design. Druckmann’s first role in design was for the Uncharted series. While he also did design work, he was also heavily involved in writing Uncharted.
When Naughty Dog decided to allocate resources into a new game in 2011, Druckmann was chosen for his past work to lead development.
Druckmann was a man who wore many hats. In college he studied criminology and computer science, at the ETC he developed artistic skills, and in preparation for leading The Last of Us he took acting classes in order to learn how to communicate with actors.
